Beckett and Television:In a Different Context

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Sociologist Manuel Castellss sweeping 1,445-page, three-volume study,under the general title The Information Age, details the ways in whichthe rapid development and proliferation of information technology overthe past two decades has created radically new social paradigms that callinto question traditional societal structures and individuals relationsto communal organizations as well as their personal perceptions of self.Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar oppositionof the Net and the Self, Castells writes in his introduction tovolume 1. The Net, a term covering the ever-expanding networkedcommunication media, he defines as fluid and constantly changing, whilethe Self is in a constant search for some fixity or certainty, now that theprimary markers of identity sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial areno longer clearly delineated or self-evident. This bipolarity between Netand Self has given rise to a condition Castells describes as structuralschizophrenia, in which patterns of social communication becomeincreasingly under stress (3).Although Samuel Beckett died in the late 1980s, just at the dawn of the

period Castells surveys, when the information highway was still littlemore than a two-lane road, his writing already reflected the bipolarityand resultant social and personal schizophrenia technological advancesbrought in their wake. Becketts earliest fictional narrator, BelacquaShuah, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, may call for [t]he facts letus have facts, facts, plenty of facts (32), but his narrative illustrates thatthe more he knows the less he understands and can tell about himself orthe world. Under a deluge of details, the very scaffolding of the fictionalform itself collapses, burying with it Beckett makes clear thebelief that information can clarify. In 1949, two years before MarshallMcLuhan published his first media study, The Mechanical Bride,Beckett had already written a play that staged the impendingconfrontation between the new technology and the individual: Lucky,

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in Waiting for Godot, caught in a net, suffering from informationaloverload, spewing out facts and regurgitating the words and ideas ofothers, his thinking reduced to performance on demand, with accom-panying dance steps, ending, finally, in silence. The image, no less thanthe play itself, illustrated Becketts awareness of how all fact-basedsystems (like the one he had experienced close up in Vichy France) andlike the languages on which they are built, have the potential to entrapand render mute those caught in their net.Beckett and Castells seem to be addressing similar concerns about the

estrangement and disorientation caused by modern technologys impacton social institutions and personal identity. However, whereas Beckettfocuses on the malady, Castells in his massive study makes a case for theamelioration of the dis-ease. After ranging the globe for examples,he concludes that the proliferation of information systems allows for thepossibility of new social and political groups to develop and thrive inthe culture of real virtuality technology has created, which facilitatesthe human spirit reunit[ing] its dimensions in a new interaction betweenthe two sides of the brain, machines, and social contexts (1: 328).Committed as Castells is to a belief in rationality and the chances ofmeaningful social action, and transformative politics (1: 4), he sidestepsany shadow of scepticism that might threaten to destabilize the solidfoundations upon which his data rest.Beckett also talked of spirit, telling Patrick Bowles in 1955 that

[w]hat counts is the spirit and that people are not in touch with theirspirit; but he defined the condition not as the contemporary malaisebut rather as the malaise of all time (qtd. in Knowlson and Knowlson110), the artist incapable of reunit[ing] its dimensions throughtechnology, as Castells posits, able only to point to the chaos ormess (qtd. in Driver 218). That does not mean that Beckett avoided theuse of technology in his plays. On the contrary, technology became oneof the means by which he attempted to admit the chaos and . . . not try tosay that the chaos is really something else (qtd. in Driver 219). In fact,his post-Godot stage works are filled with technology: magnetic tapes andtape recorder in Krapps Last Tape; unseen recording devices in Footfalls,That Time, Rockaby, Catastrophe, and What Where; light sources usedas stand-ins for absent physical presences in Play and Breath; andgadgets and objects of all sorts to aid, vex, and perplex his characters.A considerable number of his thirty-three dramatic works were writtenfor specific media: six for radio, one for film, and five for television. Healso took a keen interest in all phases of the productions of these plays.Martin Esslin, whose position with the BBC Radio Drama Departmentallowed him to work closely with and observe Beckett, noted hispassionate interest in technologies involved with radio and . . . his brilliant

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use of his technical know-how in controlling the production with theutmost precision (214). Those who were involved in his filmand television projects made the same observations.1

Becketts plays for technological media are certainly some of his mostexperimental works, avant-garde even by todays standards, breaking theconventions of the designated medium just as his stage plays reshapedthe contours and possibilities of theatre. They have also become thesubject of a small but growing number of studies over the past few years,facilitated by the increasing availability of copies of original productionsto supplement Becketts highly technical, unreadable scripts,2 bythe general interest in all things technological in contemporary culture,and by the pressing question those who write about and teach Beckettconfront: how relevant are his plays in our information age? My subjectin this essay is Becketts television work, a topic that hasreceived particular attention of late, thanks to the research of GillesDeleuze, Eckart Voigts-Virchow, Hans H. Hiebel, Graley Herren, and,particularly, Daniel Albright.3 In his recent book Beckett and Aesthetics,Albright argues that, while Beckett, like Surrealist artists, is dotingon technique (3), he does so not to show technologys potential andpower but, rather, its muteness, incompetence, non-feasance oftransmission (2), the medium allowed to dwindle before the stressthat Beckett places on it (2). I agree that Beckett uses technologyto indict itself just as he uses language to reveal its paucity creatinga technology of the unworkable just as he committed himself at thebeginning of his career to write a literature of the unword (Beckett,Letter 173).4 However, I do not believe it necessarily follows, asAlbright claims, that in his theatre of media (2) a term he uses toinclude the stage plays as well as those written for radio, film, andtelevision Beckett intends to eliminate human presence totally. Albrightstates that in these plays Beckett reveals his characters to be only flimsy,jury-rigged theatrical conveniences, all dreck and bricolage (25).The television play Ghost Trio is just a game with superimposedrectangles the visual system is detaching itself from every humanmeaning (136); Eh Joe, the flimsy pattern of dark and light dots on thescreen (129). Would we really care about Becketts theatre more thanhalf century after the first production of Waiting for Godot and fortyyears after his first television drama, Eh Joe, if all that remained when thelast word was spoken or the last image formed was a world of techniquewithout purpose, in which people, at least in the plays written for specifictechnological media, are reduced to lines, dots, and to use anotherAlbright description ooze ?These television plays present Becketts usual decrepits, those whom

Deleuze described in his discussion of Becketts television drama as

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the exhaustive, the dried up, the extenuated and the dissipated(Exhausted 12) and whom Beckett said seem[ed] to be falling tobits (qtd. in Shenker 148).5 However, just as these disintegrating,enervated figures are never completely vanquished or eliminated from hisstage plays, they are never completely obliterated by technological meansin his television works. Beckett saw the potential media afforded him toexplore being the central subject of all his works and he took fulladvantage of these new possibilities to say the unsayable, this time withtelevision technology. He was able to create a syntax of weakness(Harvey 13536) in which form would not impose itself as a sign ofstrength (136) but would allow the dustman (137) his fictive creature,to still be visible and perceivable, although just barely.What I am interested in exploring in this essay are the ways in which

Becketts television plays, particularly Ghost Trio, both foreground themedium for which they were written and at the same time instantiate theunresolved and for him unresolvable bipolarity Castells describesbetween technology and selfhood, and the structural schizophreniasuch struggles produce. As my title indicates, I will place the discussion ofthese television works in a different context. Several of Albrightscontentions are similar to those laid out by Marshall McLuhan, oneof the early theoreticians of media, who wrote at precisely the timeBeckett began his own media explorations, when television was inits infancy and few realized either its potential or its power. McLuhanscomments on Becketts theatre indicate that he understood the directionBeckett was taking, although he did not sanction or follow it. In addition,some of McLuhans better known theories on media provide useful waysof approaching Becketts television work and assessing his praxis. Theyalso illustrate how well Beckett read the technological environment of hisown time and instinctively understood the world in wait just around themillennial bend.

MCLUHAN ON BECKETT

Marshall McLuhan is a name that does not appear in Beckett studies: notin James Knowlsons comprehensive biography, Ruby Cohns A BeckettCanon, or in contemporary books or articles discussing Becketts useof technology. Even a Google search turns up nothing. Its not hardto understand why. If ever there were two men diametrically opposedin temperament, philosophy, creative output, and just about everythingelse, it was the self-contained, publicity-shy, precise, inner-seeking,minimalist Beckett and the 1960s media guru-cum-pop-icon McLuhan,a man given to bumper-sticker slogans and metaphoric riffs, whosepenchant for showmanship finally led him to be more embraced on

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the Johnny Carson show, in Woody Allens Annie Hall, and in thepages of Playboy and Mad magazine than in academe. As Castells putsit, McLuhan was the great visionary who revolutionized thinking incommunications in spite of his unrestrained use of hyperbole (1: 329).Done in by the near total commodification and cannibalizing of histheories by the popular culture he championed and by serious critiquesof his works by academics who pointed out inconsistencies anddistortions, he disappeared from critical attention after his death in1980. However, in the past ten years McLuhan has enjoyed something ofa revival. He is the subject of two recent biographies and of numerousbooks reinterpreting his writing, and was the central figure in a 1996 play,The Medium, directed by Ann Bogart.6 This renewed interest is fuelledby a growing awareness that many of his messages about the televisionmedium, seen as excessive or crackbrained (the old style) in the 1960s,may have, in fact, been correct. Now that the smoke has settled, itis possible to discern the less celebratory and more cautionary concernshe raised about media, their development, potential, and impact. Some ofthese ideas have relevance to Becketts television work.Like Castells, McLuhan had a penchant for overarching schema and

grand interlacing patterns, fed by his belief in the potential of the rationalmind and, in part, by his adult conversion to Catholicism.7 UnlikeCastells, he did not use graphs of economic and behavioural datato bolster his arguments; instead, he based his analyses on the modernistliterary trinity he revered: Pound, Yeats, and most importantly Joyce.While his student Hugh Kenner8 went on to add Becketts name to thathallowed list, McLuhan did not. He does refer to Beckett and his writing,but never with reverence. As his biographer Philip Marchand explains,It was an unspoken article of faith with McLuhan that all great artistswere really Catholic, either overtly or in their secret sympathies. Thosewho could not, by any stretch of imagination or conjecture, be termedCatholic, like Milton or Samuel Beckett, were hopeless cases (106).And worse. The Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog, a close McLuhan friendand Beckett admirer (he illustrated Becketts Imagination DeadImagine for publisher John Calder) once suggested that the two menmight have things in common. McLuhan, who regarded the absolutegodlessness of Becketts work with something approaching horror, grewso red in the face that one of his veins stood out (Marchand 286).Despite this antipathy, there are Beckett citations in McLuhans

writing. His name appears in the introduction to the second editionof McLuhans important, groundbreaking 1964 book, UnderstandingMedia, in a passage as general, elliptical, and slippery as is most of hiswriting: The existential philosophy, as well as the Theater of the Absurd,represents anti-environments that point to the critical pressures

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of the new electric environment. Jean-Paul Sartre, as much as SamuelBeckett and Arthur Miller, has declared the futility of blueprintsand classified data and jobs as a way out (xxi). When he writesof anti-environments, McLuhan is referring to his theory that eachtechnological innovation creates a new environment growing out of theone it replaces: talkies supplanting silent films, television built on radio.Those who live in the present are generally incapable of understanding,identifying, or analysing such new environments, since they are absorbedwithin them and cannot find the necessary position of objective distancethat would allow critique. Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure and overall pattern elude easy perception,he argues (Medium 8585). Although the present affords no glimpseof itself, it does provide a retrospective look at what it replaced, thenature of the earlier medium now apparent as the content of the newform. Each new technology creates an environment that is itselfregarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns itspredecessor into an art form (Understanding Media ix). McLuhanclaims that people look at the present through a rear view mirror, notin horror, like Walter Benjamins angel of history, but rather in denial,a mark of some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs understress and shock conditions (Medium 75; Understanding Media 265).That is, all but artists. They have, he often repeats, the resources andtemerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age(Media Research 87).His model for such an artist is James Joyce, on whom McLuhan

patterns his own writing style and whom he continually refers to as theartist of this century who gave the most careful attention to the impacton language and art of all technical development in the meansof communication (Media Research 80). He reads Ulysses as anextended radio flash sent out on 16 June 1904; Finnegans Wake structuredon television as the basic modality of the collective human drama; andJoyces experiments with language in both works as examples of a newform for a new electronic age (Understanding Media 81).In the case of Beckett, McLuhan believes that, instead of engaging

with the environment of his time as Joyce did and trying to use his art totease his readers and audiences into some perception of the new mediathat affect their lives, he chose, like Sartre and Miller (a strangebedfellow),9 to focus instead on the negative and alienating effects oftechnology rather than its possibilities. This position is close to whatAlbright expresses when he writes that [a]loof, eremitical, Beckett wroteabout technology as if it were somebody elses environment (1).However, McLuhan assumes that Becketts disregard for media andactive positioning of himself and his work against the technology of his

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time were similar to those of many other intellectuals, whereas Albrightargues, and I concur, that Beckett took an active interest in and cleverlyused media for his own purposes.McLuhan expands his comments on Beckett in a section of

Understanding Media entitled Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane, whichtraces interrelated and progressively more complex forms of technology.Directly borrowing the argument Kenner set forth in his seminal studySamuel Beckett, published three years earlier, McLuhan writes thatBecketts use of the bicycle is the prime symbol of the Cartesian mindin its acrobatic relation of mind and body in precarious imbalance,describing Becketts unsteady cyclist as a clown who mimes the acrobatin an elaborate drama of incompetence, his bicycle the sign and symbolof specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all interactand react, using all of our faculties at once (166). Extendinghis metaphor, McLuhan equates the cyclist/clown with HumptyDumpty, who cannot be put back together again because those who tryhave no unified vision of the whole, they are helpless (166) thisMcLuhan sees as Becketts central message and his failure. In contrast,he credits Joyce, who, in his a-stone-aging Finnegans Wake, had theability of recovering the unity of plastic and iconic space, and is puttingHumptyDumpty back together again (166).What is interesting in this discussion is how closely McLuhan follows

Becketts own positioning of himself vis-a`-vis Joyce. Beckett, too, calledJoyce a synthesizer, someone who wanted to put everything, thewhole of human culture, into one or two books; himself he describedas an analyser. I take away all the accidentals because I want to comedown to the bedrock of the essentials, the archetypal (qtd. in Knowlsonand Knowlson 4749). McLuhan was also correct about Becketts denialof any unified vision of the whole and his recognition of humanhelplessness and of the impossibility of horses and men ortechnology repairing the broken little man on the ground, or returninghim to his wall and the smug certainty that aid will come should he beginto totter.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

In his other writing, although he does not refer specifically to Beckett,McLuhan provides some useful theoretical tools to approach Beckettsmedia work. One example is his most famous and infamous aphorism:the medium is the message. It was intended to be purposely vague hisusual strategy in order to serve as an attention-getting, wake-up call tothose unaware of the ways media have a greater impact on society thanany messages that they might deliver. Writers such as Rebecca West

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understood him to mean that content was no longer important andattacked what they took as the tacit approval of emptiness which isthe core of McLuhanism (West 18). McLuhan denied this reductiveinterpretation, arguing that societies have always been shaped more bythe nature of the media by which men communicate than by the contentof communication and must be made aware of this condition (Medium8). There need be no blindness in these matters once we have beennotified that there is anything to observe, he claimed (UnderstandingMedia 57). Even Jonathan Miller, who wrote a scathing attack onMcLuhans language and logic, praised him for his magic trick: makinginvisible media suddenly appear and successfully conven[ing] a debateon a subject that has been neglected too long (123). That is to borrow aBeckettian phrase McLuhan turned a nothing into a something.So did Beckett. As Albright points out, Beckett saw much more

clearly than most of his contemporaries that art resists the modelsimposed on it; and so, instead of imposing purposes and templates uponart, he experimented with the notion that an artistic medium itself mightbe made to speak, if approached with a sort of intelligent humility (2).Most early critics of McLuhans writing assumed that what the speakingmedium would tell, in McLuhan terms, would not be its own failures butits successes, since if McLuhan were known for anything in his period, itwas as a champion of the new technology not its critic, like Baudrillard,who diverged from McLuhans supposed optimism about the potential ofmedia. However, in contemporary rethinking of McLuhans writing andpositions, there are those, including Cecelia Tichi, who grant that he mayhave been a less vociferous supporter than anxious observer of the mediahe described (184), less a cheerleader for technology than an observer andprognosticator of the technological beast slouching towards SiliconValley (or wherever) to be born. As McLuhan himself explained in atelevision interview as early as 1966:

Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, youre in

favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is

almost certainly something Im resolutely against. And it seems to me the best

way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the

buttons. (qtd. in Benedetti and DeHart 70)

The idea of a medium whose content would reveal the nature andlimits of that medium was consistent with Becketts approach in hisstage plays, in which he foregrounded the apparatus of theatre itself,revealing its trappings, conventions, and artifice. He would performa similar operation to get to the bare bones of the media for which hewrote.

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MEDIA COOL AND HOT

Although the medium is the message is a better-known McLuhanism,his comments on television as a cool medium have far more relevanceto Becketts television plays. Again McLuhans choice of termsobfuscated his meaning. When he called television a cool, film a hot,medium many assumed he was saying that television was cold, lesssensory than film, more remote, and that viewers were more passive intheir responses. The opposite was the case. McLuhan took histerminology primarily from jazz where, as critic Paul Levinson puts it,cool implies the wispy, tinkly sketches of sound that intrigue andseduce the psyche, and hot indicates the brassy, big band music thatoverpowers and intoxicates the soul (106).10 For McLuhan, cooland hot media were differentiated mainly by their means of transmissionand the effects they had on viewers. The television image, he noted, wascreated by a light through process, similar to that in which light shinesthrough stained glass, creating mosaic patterns that observers mustreassemble. Film and photographs are light on media, the illuminationbouncing off but not interacting with, or changing, the contours of thealready fixed, predetermined images. Television is also low definition, itsborders imprecise, its images blurry, its means of transmission billions ofdots per second, from which the viewer accepts only a few dozen eachinstant, from which to make an image (Understanding Media 273).Because it required the reassembling of images, McLuhan assumedtelevision would pull viewers in and that they would becomemore absorbed in the medium and thus forge a deeper, more directrelationship with it. Film, by contrast, is high definition, offering detailedinformation, its images clear, crisp, bright, and fixed. Not a process liketelevision, it is a product, pictures presented in frames not fragments,unaltered and unalterable by transmission or reception, requiring nothingof the viewer except to observe what is projected from behind them andsuperimposed on a screen in front. Although film may be called movingpictures, McLuhan described it as static compared to television. TheTV image is not a still shot, he argued; it is a ceaselessly formingcontour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plasticcontour . . . has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture(Understanding Media 27273).In addition, television of the early 1960s, which McLuhan

was describing, was often live, transmitted in real time, not alreadycanned, like film. The standard format was still black and white,not colour. With the small size of the screen and the intimacy of thereception seen in rooms in private houses rather than in public spacesamong strangers television relied heavily on close-ups and thus required

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more intimate, less broad acting styles that focused attention onre-actions, whereas films staple long and group shots were designedto transmit action. Finally, television provided audiences with a degree ofcontrol over the image and the sound. They were able to make the picturebrighter or darker, the volume louder or softer; they could turn theprogram on or, if it did not please, switch it off, or find another. The filmviewer, by contrast, paid and entered an auditorium at specified times;could leave but could not start, stop, or alter the transmission. For allthese reasons, television for McLuhan was cool, addictive, ubiquitous,and powerful.I have found no record indicating McLuhans awareness of Becketts

plays for media; the only Beckett work he mentions by name isWaiting for Godot. Perhaps his antipathy to the un-Catholic writerblocked, or at least muted, his interest. He certainly could have readof these works in Kenners studies, which, by 1973, included analyses ofall the radio dramas and of the television play Eh Joe. Or he could haveheard of Becketts radio work from Donald McWhinnie Beckettsfriend and the director of All That Fall and the British version of GhostTrio whom McLuhan quotes in Understanding Media. Had heread about or seen Becketts plays for radio, film, or televisionhe might have recognized that, far from denying the possibilitiesthe electronic age provided, he marshalled media successfully, howeverfor his own purpose: not, as Joyce did, to show the plasticity of thewhole, but rather to reveal its fractures and fissures. McLuhan mightalso have noted that Beckett built his media plays on a few of his owncentral tenets:

g that a new medium might be delineated by calling attention to the old

medium it supplants

g that the medium is the central message conveyed by a media work

g that the low-density, blurred images of television can have a heightened

power and involve viewers directly, suggesting levels of exploration beyond

surface reality

BECKETT THROUGH MCLUHAN

The first thing to note about Becketts writing for media is how hescrupulously pares down the forms he uses just as he limits the elementsin his fiction and stage plays, purposely eliminating anything that mightdraw attention to content or story or that might be mistaken for thetypical fare being turned out at the time.11 Radio drama, as Beckettdescribes it, is predicated on the whole things coming out of the dark

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(qtd. in Zilliacus frontpiece). However, rather than attempt audioverisimilitude to allow listeners to lapse imaginatively into the world ofthe characters as radio drama tends to do he stylizes the sound effectsin order to keep mimesis at bay, the mechanisms of radio alwaysapparent. He does the same in his film and television works. Both mediaare stripped down as far as possible to let the technological bones show.Although the technique probably derives from Becketts tendency towardsimplicity, its effect is to reveal the nature of the medium and to showwhat it doesnt do: provide clarity and wholeness to the mess of life orthe world of the self.Film is a good example of a medium itself speaking. It also illustrates

McLuhans notion that a present environment can only be understood byusing the past medium as the content of the present technology, nowreified as art. A talkie, filmed in 1964, Film is set in 1929, the era ofsilent films, which it consciously attempts to replicate.12 It is filmed in35mm black and white, is twenty-two minutes long (the usual length of asilent film), and is silent, except for one telling Shhh, an auditory joketo indicate that the film could speak if it wanted to. Even the plot isborrowed from the past: the Max Sennett Keystone Kops chase films,rematerialized in Film by the choice of silent film star Buster Keaton. Todisplace focus from plot to medium, Beckett eliminates all elements thatmight allow the audience to relate directly to specific characters, places,or situations. The protagonist/Keaton is not given a proper name; in thescript he is identified as O (object), his pursuer as E (Eye). The centralaction of this chase film is Os frantic but vain attempts to escape whatBeckett calls the unbearable quality of Es scrutiny (Film 57), theanguish of perceivedness (Film 11); or, as Deleuze rhetorically askswhen discussing Film, [h]ow can we rid ourselves of ourselves, anddemolish ourselves? (Cinema 1 66). To materialize this psychologicalstruggle, Beckett manipulates the camera. In the written directions thatform the basis for the project,13 he notes that, as long as E keeps within a45! angle, the angle of immunity (11), as Beckett calls it, O escapes self-perception; beyond that, he becomes aware of Es invasion of hisselfhood. The central technical problem was how to distinguish betweenOs visual field and Es. The solution worked out by the films directorAlan Schneider, cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and Beckett, who flewto New York City especially to participate in the filming was to haveOs vision appear blurred, an effect created by a gauze over the cameralens, while Es vision remained clear. Only at the end of the film, in theinvestment scene, when O finally faces E, does he recognize that, asBeckett puts it, the pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self (11).And it is only at this moment that the audience, perceivers of both O andE, become fully aware of the way that technology has been marshalled to

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embody the theme of the work cinematically: Esse est percipi [to be is tobe perceived] (11).The completed film demonstrates that Beckett was struggling against

the seduction of modern film, which, as McLuhan describes it, is moreabout action than re-action and is fixed, rather than fluid, predicated onlinear, defined narratives, rather than on a series of indistinct images, andprovides a finished product rather than a process that viewers mustcomplete. Becketts solution was to return to the early, silent form,thereby allowing him to jettison colour, sound, and that camera workused to foist a sense of reality on modern film. In so doing, Beckett alsopoints to the traps and snares of the present technological environmentby offering the prior medium as content. Although the results werestriking, they were not exactly what Beckett had imagined, and he wasforced to make several changes to accommodate the limits of filmtechnology (Knowlson 523; Schneider). In addition, filmmaking wasexpensive and time consuming, with hours spent on one close-up(Knowlson 524). These problems may have led Beckett to try television,a much more congenial medium for his intimate explorations of being.Eh Joe (1965) and Ghost Trio (1975) have their roots in Film (in the

natural technological order that McLuhan pointed out), presentingprogressively more nebulous, blurred images. Thematically, the three areexamples of what Kenner calls the man in the room (1378) motif;however, in the shift from film to TV, the overt clown elements Kennerdescribes as central to such depictions which were part of Keatonsperformance fall away, as do those few delineating marks of characterand place still apparent in Film. Although Keaton kept his face turnedaway from the camera until the last frame, his trademark porkpie hat wasvisible throughout, and, though swathed in a greatcoat, his body and hisspecial walk were still recognizable. Eh Joe and Ghost Trio, without thehelp of gauze-covered lenses, present even more visually indistinctimages, more intimate and moving, typical of the cool TV mediumMcLuhan describes. In both, the viewer is carefully drawn into theemotional struggles of the silent central figures, more so than in Film butnot in the ways typical of television dramas.Eh Joe,14 written a year after the filming of Film, is far less

technologically complicated than its predecessor. Its setting is no longera sparsely furnished room15 but rather an obviously constructedtelevision set: a contrived space, without depth, truncated to containonly basic props. Joe traverses this physical space, opening, closing, andsecuring window, door, and cupboard, even kneeling down to look underthe bed to make sure no one observes him. His actions are reminiscent ofthose of O, but Joe is less active; the focus of the play is on re-action notaction, as befitting the medium. This time, all extraneous eyes are

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subsumed in the single eye of the television camera. In the openingsequence, it is positioned one yard from Joe, observing him full-lengthfrom behind as he makes his bedroom check. Once he comes to rest onthe edge of his bed, it moves to face him, still at a one-yard distance,although, as Becketts directions indicate, Joes eyes are turned inward,a listening look (qtd. in Harmon 203).Whereas Film was virtually silent, Eh Joe talks with a vengeance.

V (Womans Voice) is the audible pursuer, speaking in a low, distinct,remote voice, with little colour (Eh Joe 201). Presumably a spurnedlover, she prods Joe about his betrayals, isolation, and mostdramatically the suicide of the woman who took her place. In herrevenge tale, she is abetted by the camera. In the pauses between sectionsof her monologue, it moves closer in nine four-inch increments, untilvirtually flush with Joes face, revealing the full extent of his innerresponse to her relentless voice and painful recriminations.As McLuhan argued, the TV medium is best suited for close-ups,

which capture the complex nuances of feeling aroused by emotions, aswell as by outer stimulation. In this play, Joe says nothing; his face saysit all. At the same time, the steady progression of the cameraaccomplishes what McLuhan imagined was possible in this coolmedium: it draws the viewer into Joes inner world, from whicha dead voice in his head emanates (qtd. in Harmon 201).16

In television, that peephole art,17 the closer the camera comes, themore viewers react to the voice and connect with Joe and his innerstruggles. Vs repeated word imagine added by Beckett in a latetypescript18 prods them to recreate in their own minds the suicide sceneshe relates in such detail. Daniel Albright assumes that in Eh Joe theintrusive camera destroys any empathetic relation between character andviewer, Joes face losing both its corporeality and humanity: Joe hasalready surrendered his soul, in the sense that he has passed intoa technological simulacrum of a human being. He is an Adam futur; cuthim open and you find a TV receiver (129). In fact, Beckett went toconsiderable lengths to indicate that Joes face does not disintegrateunder the interrogation of the camera. In several letters to Alan Schneider who was about to direct the play in America with George Rose Beckett reminds him to include an action at the end of the play that doesnot appear in the printed version: Smile at very end when voice stops(having done it again) (qtd. in Harmon 198). In a subsequent letter,Beckett repeats the request: I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smileat the end (oh not a real smile). He wins again. So ignore directionImage fades, voice as before. Face still fully present till last Eh Joe.Then smile and slow fade (qtd. in Harmon 202).

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In terms of the model of the television medium that McLuhan sets out,the proximity of this final shot, with its blurred, fluid image, does notpreclude the personal involvement of viewers. On the contrary, itillustrates how television can be employed to create intimacy, by allowinga man in a room to be seen by others sitting alone in their rooms, seeingand perhaps feeling what the figure is feeling.19 Rather than the machinerouting Joe, or Joe being reduced to a machine, Beckett makes Joe andhis conscience visually and audibly palpable and communicative, throughthe very manipulations of the camera and recorded voice.In Eh Joe, part of the power of the work is created by Vs monologue,

spoken with plenty of venom (qtd. in Harmon 198), addressed to Joebut overheard by the television audience, whose probing eyes Joe cannotvanquish or detect. In Ghost Trio,20 V (Female Voice) is not a spurnedlover in the head but a mechanical voice in the machine itself, some sortof director, producer, or prompter. And this time, her words are spoken at least initially not to the televised figure in the play but directly to theviewers in front of their TVs. V begins, Good evening. Mine is a faintvoice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] Good evening. Mine is a faintvoice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] It will not be raised, nor lowered,whatever happens (248). Her words and delivery parody the opening ofmany television programs of the period. However, instead of amellifluous, welcoming voice framing the program that is about to bebeamed and whetting the viewers interest by the suggestion thatsomething, in fact, is going to happen, Vs is a mechanical, monotonevoice, concerned with the transmission of the play, Becketts most directforegrounding of medium as message. To point to the technology atwork, he playfully has V repeat the first three brief sentences, suggestingthat some glitch in the mechanical reproduction may have occurred, thedisembodied, recorded voice perhaps stuck, prompting the viewer to wantto check the equipment. However, V quickly forestalls any suchmanipulations: Keep that sound down, she demands, ironicallypointing to the television viewers ability to control or even end receptionas against the machines attempt to wield power and punish deviation.The same struggle is replicated within the play between F (Figure) andV, who also attempts to control his movements. Both parallel plots, ifthey can be called that, hearken back to Castellss description oftechnology versus self.Beckett divides Ghost Trio into three parts, based on production issues

not story development: I Pre-action, II Action, and III Re-action.At the beginning of Part One, V draws viewers into what she calls thefamiliar chamber (248), but the playing space is the least familiarof any of Becketts man-in-the-room plays. It consists of a seriesof rectangles in a small rectangular room floor, wall, and window

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0.70m by 1.50m; door and pallet 0.70m by 2.0m; and even smallerrectangles, including stool (actually a rectangular bench in production),cassette player, pillow, and mirror. V assigns names to the interchange-able rectangular gray forms she describes and then reinscribes within theconfines of the constructed chamber. Only after going through a detaileddescription of the set, making the audience see it as she says it, does shefinally introduce the inhabitant of the space, sole sign of life a seatedfigure (249), seen sitting on the stool bent over and presumably listeningto the cassette clutched between his hands. Her sibilants seem to animateand breathe life into F, frozen until she speaks him into being. Unlike inFilm and Eh Joe, where the men had dimensionality and bodily contours,in Ghost Trio, as the title indicates, F is spectral, like a moveablesculpture, his image recalling McLuhans description of the ultimate TVpicture as a resulting plastic contour . . . [that] has the quality ofsculpture and icon, rather than of picture. Dressed in a tight-fittingblack garment that covers all but his neck, face, head, and hands, F isidentified as part of the interior in Part One. In Part Two, at Vs prompts,he glides with marionette-like movements21 in a counter-clockwisedirection around the already designated stations of his chamber: door,window, pallet, and stool. And in Part Three he repeats the actionswithout Vs direction.Again the television camera is a palpable presence but is used in more

complex and subtle ways than in Eh Joe. Beckett provides a diagramindicating that it is to move in a straight line, backward as well as forwardfrom A, the furthest remove, to B, the middle zone, and C, the nearestshot of F, stool, and door. In these positions, the camera swirls to followhim around his room. The text also calls for an additional unletteredposition, a further close-up, focusing on Fs head, hands, and the cassettehe holds. In Part Three, a second camera position is added, establishingFs perspective as viewing subject as well as perceived object, showingwhat he sees outside the confines of the chamber. Beckett also adds twoother camera angles: one from above looking down on the stool andcassette and one a close-up of a mirror reflecting nothing. Neither istaken from the established camera-range positions. The effect of thesenumerous camera shots is to destabilize the technological patterningBeckett initially establishes. In Eh Joe, a decade earlier, he was content touse advancing close-up; this time he exposes the ways in which the camerafunctions, not in a regulated, understandable fashion, but in oneseemingly capricious, illogical, and flawed. This, perhaps, indicatesthe inherent instability of all mechanical reproduction or points to thelimited perspectives of those who stand invisible behind the scenes likeV and direct the cameras use, or of those who watch unquestioninglyat home.

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context 483

This same sense of technology run amok is reinforced by Vs failingattempts to control F. In Part One, it is her voice that brings him to life;in Part Two, she indicates what his actions will be and he executes them.However, near the end of this part, after hovering near his pallet, helooks over his shoulder, making an unscheduled and presumably self-determined stop in front of the mirror, a rectangle not identified by V inPart One. In response, V emits a surprised, Ah! which may give voiceto Fs surprised reaction to his own face, which the viewers do not see, orindicate her own loss of control over the figure she is animating. If thelatter, her next command, now to door, can be seen as her attempt toregain mastery, as she did in the opening section of the play in relation tothe viewers. However, F does not follow the prompt, returning insteadto his stool, again a seemingly self-willed transgression of the designatedorder. This is followed by Vs words, Stop and then Repeat, the lastaudible command she gives before lapsing into silence in Part Three.Fs independence is left purposely ambiguous in the play. So, too, is the

language of the commands V delivers. Phrases such as he will now thinkhe hears her are in the indicative mood and are addressed to the viewers;but they can also be imperative, if addressed to F, who may like manya Beckett character think of himself in the third person, as someonewho watches himself act, or may be an actual performer in a televisionplay, performing it as V is saying it, his deviations signs not of humanagency but of human fallibility, of getting the actions wrong.An even more intriguing manipulation of technology that creates

similar ambiguity and calls attention to the medium concerns the musicused in the work. The play takes its title from the largo movement ofBeethovens Piano Trio op. 70, no. 1, known as the Ghost. Theassumption is that the music heard is an unadulterated recording ofthe work, played by the cassette that F holds. However, Catherine Lawshas suggested that Beckett uses the music in the same way as he doesother elements of the play, positing them provisionally only in order toundermine their stability as their constructedness is revealed (202).In her close analysis of the excerpts played, she shows Beckettsmanipulations of the score for example, beginning with second partsof sections and his rearrangement of the temporal order of someextracts (208).22 These alterations, easily missed by one unfamiliar withthe music, raise questions about what the television audience actuallyhears. In a draft version of the play, Beckett noted that there is to beheard and unheard music, indicating that F and the audience do nothear the full work and pointing once again to technical mistakes inherentin mechanical reproduction, marks of incompetent editing, or theconstructedness of all musical accompaniment in media, an alwaysartificial manipulation of its original form (Maier 26778).

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Not only does Beckett undermine the integrity of the music itself but healso calls into question its source in the play. His precise writtendirections indicate a direct correlation between the level of the soundand the movement of the camera in relation to the implied object oftransmission, the cassette. At position B, faint music is audible, atC it rises, and in close-up it is further heightened. However, at A, thefurthest remove from F and the cassette, it is inaudible. But not always.At the crucial end of Part Two, after F breaks his ambulatory cycle andreturns to his stool rather than to the door as V commands, the directionsindicate Faint music audible for first time at A. It grows louder.5 seconds (251). Again, Beckett draws attention to the technology and itsfunction. In radio, film, and television, music is usually ancillary to plotand action, providing punctuation that determines and directsthe emotional responses of audiences. The source of this music is rarelyshown; nor is a mechanical means of reproduction indicated.23

Ordinarily, if music is successful in doing its job, it is supposed to gounnoticed. At first, it seems to do just that in Ghost Trio. F hovers overthe cassette listening to the Ghost. However, as the randomness of thecamera positions and audio reproduction become more apparent, viewersbegin to question whether the music is, in fact, emanating from the small,battery-operated cassette, which F is never shown to turn on or off.They are also not provided with the usual direct narrative connection

between plot and musical accompaniment. The ostensible story of GhostTrio concerns a tryst its earlier title F awaiting the visit of a womanwhose failure to appear is announced by a young boy at the end of PartThree, a variation of Waiting for Godot reduced to the intimate confinesof the television screen. Or, as Beckett described the play: [a]ll the oldghosts. Godot and Eh Joe over infinity (qtd. in Knowlson 621). Weremusic used in a traditional fashion, it would rise and fall dependingon the vicissitudes of the tryst story. Instead, Beckett uses the musicas one more way of pointing to technological indeterminacy in the play:introducing the cassette and then casting doubt about its purpose, tyingcamera action to audio transmission, although television camerasare incapable of recording sound without booms or other technology;and shattering visual and audio patterns that he establishes. In all theseways, Beckett thus manipulates the medium to become the content of theplay. He also conflates character and viewer, both held under the sway ofa mechanical art that, in practice, proves progressively more fallible.In Part Three of Ghost Trio, V is silent or silenced and F show signs

of subjectivity, seeing as well as being seen, his face now visible in themirror that was previously empty. These changes in the technologicalhierarchy fill the content position, eliminating the tryst story, so thatwhen the boy leaves, the viewer is moved less by the womans failure to

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context 485

appear than by the ways in which F has somehow eluded the impositionof the medium. Beckett creates this displacement in the final shots of theplay. After the swelling last notes of the largo are heard and the camerahas moves from A to close-up, he has the camera once more move back toA, where it shows F slowly lifting his head and gazing, face-front for thefirst time in the play. Fs hands, which had held the cassette claw-like, arenow crossed, his whole body relaxed and upright, as if at the end ofa performance.24 The last image is of F re-embodied, a faint smile dartingacross his face, similar to the one Beckett required at the conclusion ofEh Joe (and would use seven years later in Catastrophe), perhaps againindicating that he has won or at least that he has not been vanquishedby the medium that sought to control and objectify him.Through the intertwining and ghosting of the figure observed and the

observer the man-in-the-room seen by men and women in their ownrooms Beckett calls into question the easy manipulation of the viewerby the media of which McLuhan warns and provides a corrective similarto the one McLuhan suggests: the best way to oppose [a medium] isto understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.However, in Becketts world, it is never that easy. Stilling technology orouting media cannot put an end to this buzzing confusion of life(qtd. in Driver 218). That remains. The viral endemic, chronic, alarmingpresence of the medium . . . dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution oflife into TV (qtd. in Brooker and Brooker 77), which Baudrillarddescribes, is not the source or the sickness. What technology can do is toprovide one more way of calling attention to the mess by allowingchaos into art and not trying to quell or explain it Becketts way offailing better in the contemporary world.

NOTES

1 For Becketts involvement in the production of Film, see Knowlson 52124;

Schneider 6394; for his work on productions of television plays, see Knowlson

538; Fehsenfeld 36066.

2 Ackerley and Gontarski argue that such works are postliterary or

extraliterary on the page, since they consist mainly of technical details.

3 For earlier discussions of Becketts plays for specific media, see Ben-Zvi,

Media Plays; Gidal; Kalb.

4 For a discussion of Becketts method of using language to critique itself, drawn

from the work of Fritz Mauthner, see Ben-Zvi, Limits of Language.

5 See also Sheehan 176.

6 For a review of The Medium, see Favorini. For recent McLuhan biographies,

see Gordon; Marchand; for critical studies, see Willmott; Neill; Levinson.

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7 On the impact of McLuhans conversion, see Marchand 5055.

8 Marchand discusses the relationship between Kenner and McLuhan and

quotes the latter as saying, I have fed Kenner too much off my plate (106).

9 See Understanding Media (206) for McLuhans comments on Death of a

Salesman.

10 Many have also assumed that the terms were taken from the youth-culture

vocabulary of the 1960s, where cool meant anything new, with it, or

way out.

11 Voigts-Virchow makes a similar point when he distinguishes between

Becketts television work and later postmodern forms: the latter full of color,

of movement, of variety, Becketts work displaying its visual and aural

paucity (not its perfection), its failures (not its achievements), its

shortcomings (not its fulfillments) (Exhausted Cameras 238); see also

Face Values.

12 For an excellent discussion of Film as a silent film, see Brater 7484.

13 The actual film diverges from this plan because of difficulties with shooting;

see Beckett, Film.

14 The following discussion of Eh Joe is based on the American version,

directed by Alan Schneider and starring George Rose and Rosemary Harris.

Beckett directed a version in German for Suddeutscher Rundfunk, with

Deryk Mendel and Nancy Illig, and Alan Gibson directed the play for

BBC, starring Jack MacGowran, for whom the piece was originally

written, and Sian Phillips.

15 The room used in Film was actually a construction, built to accommodate

Becketts precise descriptions of a Memorable Wall (qtd. in Knowlson 522).

16 Jack MacGowran called Eh Joe, the most grueling 22 minutes I have ever

had in my life, and described the camera as really photographing the mind

(qtd. in Knowlson 538).

17 Becketts description, in conversation with the author, Paris, July 1985.

18 See Ackerley and Gontarski 164.

19 In the recent Atom Egoyan stage production of Eh Joe in Dublin, a giant

screen was used to project the face of Michael Gambon, the actor playing Joe,

who listened to the taped voice of Penelope Wilton as V, sent out to the

audience by two large speakers placed on either side of the proscenium. The

impact was equally strong and may point to the way that, more and more, live

theatre approximates television.

20 The following discussion is based on the British production of Ghost Trio,

directed by DonaldMcWhinnie, with Donald Pickup as F and Billie Whitelaw as

V. Beckett directed a German version entitled Die Geister Trio for Suddeutscher

Rundfunk in May 1977, with Klaus Herm as F and Irmgard Forst as V.

21 Knowlson indicates that Beckett had Heinrich Kleists essay Uber das

Marionettentheater in mind (63233).

22 See also, Maier, who discusses the use of music in the play.

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context 487

23 The exception is in parodies, such as Mel Brookss Blazing Saddles or

attention-getting television ad campaigns, such as a recent one by British Air,

which featured a symphony orchestra knee-deep in turquoise water playing

soothing music, while a voiceover told of escape to tropical isles.

24 For an interesting discussion of Becketts manipulation of hands in his plays,

see Haynes and Knowlson 7577.

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